Hayley Welch I would wake up at 3:30 a.m. every day to go to work at the spring factory in Belfast, Tennessee.
But on June 9, while performing on Broadway in Nashville during the CMA Festival, a YouTuber captured A video of her making a sexual joke was posted online.
Now, Welch is asleep.
She has an online audience estimated in the billions just from media appearances alone. And that doesn’t even include her TikTok or Instagram views, which are so massive they’re hard to measure. She’s appeared on stage with Zach Bryan At his show in Nashville, she was spending time with him. Shaquille O’Neal in JBJ’s on Broadway.
Before the viral video, Welch had no social media presence. Now, she’s the most famous girl on the internet.
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USA TODAY caught up with Welch, now known as the “Hook Twah Girl,” and got the real deal amid a wave of social media rumors surrounding the 21-year-old. It was her second interview ever, after sitting down with Briana LaPaglia (aka Zach Bryan’s girlfriend) on the “Plan Bri” podcast.
Who is the “Hook Toah” girl?
Welch lives with her “grandmother” about 60 miles south of Nashville, Tennessee. Welch has never driven an interstate or flown in an airplane.
Now she has to navigate media outlets monitoring her grandmother’s house, internet trolls saying hurtful (and false) things about her, and people faking her identity and selling merchandise with her image that she neither authorized nor profited from.
She may be from a small town, but she’s smart. Welch has turned what started as an embarrassment into a career. She’s assembled a team that includes a lawyer, a management company and a public relations firm. According to her manager, Johnny Forster, owner of Los Angeles-based management firm The Penthouse, the team offers entertainment packages that cost upwards of $25,000 each.
“Right now, she can make more money carrying a can for five minutes than she made in the whole of last year,” Forster said.
Welch said she never imagined anyone would see the video she posted to her Facebook page. But soon after she posted it in early June, she noticed how many views it was getting.
“The first week, I was so embarrassed,” Welch told The Tennessean. “I didn’t leave my house. I went to work, but that was it. Other than that, I didn’t go anywhere. But I went from being embarrassed to being in the moment.”
Once she saw the goods being made and sold online by other people, she thought, “If everyone is making money from it, I can do it too.”
She left her job at the Spring Factory on June 27.
Has Hook Toah Girl been fired from her teaching job?
Despite these and other rumors circulating online about Welch, she was not fired from her teaching job. She was never a teacher, and she was not fired from her real job. The TikTok video of a man claiming to be her father, a preacher, is also fake. Her father is not a preacher, and neither is the man in the video.
These are the not-so-fun things about being thrust into the center of attention you didn’t know was coming.
“The negative comments bother me,” she said. “I mean, when you go through them, you think, ‘Well, you don’t know anything about me. I’m just making funny jokes. That’s my way of joking. That’s my sense of humor.’”
That’s where Forster and entertainment lawyer Christian Parker come in.
“We are here to protect the falcon from the eagles,” Forster said.
Parker first connected with Welch through work he used to do with the juvenile system in Lewisburg, near her hometown.
He met her and was immediately impressed by her personality.
“She’s a really sweet girl,” Parker said. “She’s been given an interesting spotlight, but there’s an opportunity to capitalize on it. She’s less sexy and more fun. She’s like a female Theo Vaughn. As soon as people meet her, they’re like, ‘How did she get to this level?’ But as soon as they meet her, they’re like, ‘Wow, this girl has something.’”
What’s next for Hailey Welch?
Now Welch and her team have to decide what to do with this “thing” she has.
“After we met her, we were trying to figure out why all the podcasters were calling her ‘America’s Sweetheart,’” Forster said. “So, from a branding and marketing perspective, I was just trying to figure out why everyone was falling in love with this girl.”
If you ask Welch why she thinks the viral video resonated with so many people, she says it’s because of her deep Southern accent.
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“She said most of the comments she got on the subject were like, ‘Oh, we love her accent,’ which I admit I have a very strong accent. I lived with my grandmother my whole life. That’s how I was raised.”
The most important thing for Welch now, Parker said, is to make sure she moves in a way that makes sense.
“They’ll have a lot of non-scripted TV options on the table as well as a huge merchandise lineup that can help them launch the merchandise that’s out there and get paid for it,” he said.
She and her team created a company, 16 minuteswhich features a logo of a hawk wearing a cowboy hat. That way, Forster said, people will know they’re buying her merchandise and not a fake.
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What does Hook Toah want to do with her life?
She is now focused on getting back on social media so people can connect with the real Hayley Welch and not the scammers impersonating her online. She is looking forward to her first flight to New York and California later this month.
The only thing that is certain is that there is no going back.
“We just want to tell her story,” Forster said. “She didn’t ask for it. She didn’t even have social media. She’s kind of the antithesis of anyone who tries to be a social media star. She lives with her grandmother in Belfast and she went out partying and said something silly and now everyone is talking about her.”
But for Welch, despite everything that has happened in her life over the past three weeks, nothing has affected her character.
“I’m not anyone special. I’m just a girl from a small town.”
Melonie Hurt covers music and the music industry for The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network — Tennessee. Connect with Melonie at [email protected]on X @HurtMelonee or on Instagram at @MelHurtWrites.
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